Brix Anderson's post about [Bad link] includes a Perl script that downloads the GPS Assist data for Sony cameras.

The GPS Assist data is stored on the memory card. When a memory card with GPS Assist data is inserted into a compatible GPS-equipped Sony camera — like the awesome Alpha SLT-A55V I got a few months ago — the camera has much faster lock-on times when searching for its location. The lock-on may take 10 seconds instead of requiring minutes.

I had been working without GPS Assist data since I bought the camera. I didn't understand its value, but then I had captured photos where most of the shoot was incorrectly geotagged. After investigating this, I found the GPS Assist data should help, but that it required software on the desktop to update that data. Sony did not supply the relevant package for Mac OS X to do this.

Since I wanted to make sure I got updated location information on my photos, I did some searching and came across Brix's page. I was honestly surprised to find that the GPS Assist data was written to the same memory cards as the photos, but it does make sense after some more thought.

Brix's Perl script there certainly did the trick; my SLT-A55V picked up on the new GPS Assist data on the first card I tried it with. I have a limited number of cards, so I wrote a wrapper shell script that would run the Perl downloader script if certain volumes were present in /Volumes. I control the names of the cards, so I also control their paths.

I then call that wrapper script via a LaunchAgent. The LaunchAgent is triggered via "StartOnMount," so it watches for new volumes to be mounted by Mac OS X. When a volume is mounted, the LaunchAgent runs, calls the wrapper script, the wrapper script checks for volume names, and if there is a match, runs the GPS Assist Perl script.

Now, every time I insert my memory cards to download photos, I get freshly-updated GPS Assist data for my camera.

I ran a quick test of the Python “title” string method (from Python 2.5.1 in Leopard); it fails the tests on the edge cases mentioned in the [Bad link] post at Daring Fireball. It really only uppercases the first letter of every word and lowercases everything else.

Not much better than looping through a string with ucfirst() in Perl, except you don't have to do the looping yourself.